John Ralston Saul, award-winning philosopher, novelist, and essayist

Multi-stakeholder Partnerships Designed to Facilitate Immigrant Settlement and Integration in Canada

Recent research and practice indicate that multi-stakeholder partnerships can be effective in facilitating the settlement and integration of immigrants in Canada. These partnerships may include immigrant-serving agencies, mainstream agencies, researchers, government, and other organizations working together to leverage their knowledge, skills, and resources. Examples include Réseaux en immigration francophone, Local Immigration Partnerships, Immigrant Sector Councils, Immigrant Employment Councils, and Quebec regionalization measures (such as the Conférence régionale des élus which is being reworked), among others. These partnerships enable the development of strategic and operational plans to address the challenges and opportunities associated with promoting welcoming communities for immigrants, and play an important role in organizing institutions and groups to develop coordinated approaches for putting immigrant settlement and integration onto the agenda of the broader community. They also afford an opportunity for multi-level collaborative governance, often involving cooperation among federal, provincial, and municipal governments. Though there is evidence of the effectiveness of these multi-stakeholder partnerships, there is less evidence on how best to build, operationalize, and govern these partnerships. Given the success of many of these partnerships, this knowledge is available, to some extent tacitly, but it would be useful to analyze, structure and articulate the information so that there is a sharing of knowledge and so that new partnerships can learn from the experiences of others.